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What I’ve Been Doing Since Quitting My Job
- acconrad 8y agoThe hardest thing is just finding routine. Freedom via constraints is a great thing. Once I started to plan out my entire day (and then week), my productivity skyrocketed.
- ak39 8y agoAgreed. For me it’s been forcing myself to the habit of getting stuff done from 8 am to 12 pm. After that it’s anyrhing else but serious deep work. I’m ok with 4 hours.
- mnort 8y agoenjoyed this a lot. the revelation moment was described in the kind of manner that brings a smile to your face.
- mtlynch 8y agoThanks for reading! Glad you liked it.
- m1n1 8y agohow does he pay the bills? and how about health insurance?
- p1esk 8y agoHe worked at Google for four years.
- mywittyname 8y agoYeah, I bet he has at least $1MM in liquid assets banked on top of what income he earns through his projects.
- imbusy111 8y agoI assume you are being sarcastic. How do you put off $1M in assets with a $200k median salary in four years? $200k x 4 x 65% is just $520k without even any expenses paid such as the ~$72k you would have paid for a room in a shared apartment.
- monktastic1 8y ago350k isn't uncommon for a senior SWE at Google. In a state with no income tax (such as WA), it's not unreasonable to estimate he takes home 250k (71%). Suppose he spends $60k a year, leaving him $190k/year to bank. Given the performance of the S&P 500 in the last four years, that could be a million today.
- marssaxman 8y agoI don't know where these numbers come from. I made a gross salary of $140k the year I worked at Google as a senior engineer, and I made some extra money via 401k matching too. $190k would definitely have been more than my entire income, that's for sure. It's hard to imagine that salaries have more than doubled in the six years since then. And... spending only $60k a year, living in Seattle? Yeah, maybe if you live like a monk, or you really enjoy commuting in from distant suburbs.
- monktastic1 8y agoI was a senior swe in Seattle myself. The total comp range is enormous. Despite my handle, I didn't exactly live like a monk. 2k a luxury high rise and 3k for everything else felt positively princely (though the city has become more expensive since I left).
- bradlys 8y ago$5000/month in Seattle is well more than doable. I live off <$4k in regular expenses, live alone in the bay area, and still drive a luxury car. When I was in Seattle, I lived off of $1000/month, lived on my own, and had my own car. That was about 4 years ago. Google compensation is also incredibly high. $140k is less total comp than what many new grads get at Google.
- mtlynch 8y agoThis is the correct answer.
- RikNieu 8y agoRight? My blog post on the same subject would be more on the lines of "freak out about how to have a roof over my head next month and not have my family's health insurance cancelled..."
- icedchai 8y agoI'm guessing you don't have any savings or investments? You might want to plan ahead more than your next pay check. Investigate financial independence / retire early (FIRE.)
- toovs 8y agolol easy to say for those with cash
- icedchai 8y agoIt's real tough getting cash in this industry, isn't it? Start investing now. In 10 years you'll have a small fortune.
- RikNieu 8y agoNot everyone earns Valley salaries. Especially not those outside the US in third-world countries. And some, like myself had their life savings wiped out when life got cute. Anyway, glad OP has the opportunity to do what he's doing. Didn't mean to sidetrack the conversation. Just always find it amazing how we all live in vastly different worlds.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pkaye 8y agoYes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around. Suddenly all the "plan to retire in X years" come into question. Will I be still living in X years? Will I be able to continue working and investing till then? Or will I have burn through all my savings? True financial independence doesn't come till you can weather such a storm and most people are not is such a position.
- eanzenberg 8y agomoney
- anoncoward111 8y agodisclaimer: i'm a health insurance broker if you have non-poverty-level income, you can buy a policy for about $300-500 a month through most state exchanges if you have poverty-level income (no stock dividends, no capital gains, havent worked w2 job in years), then you can qualify for Medicaid another option is to open a 1-2 employee LLC or LLP and buy small group health insurance. typically these plans are about $5-7k a year and have somewhat reasonable deductibles and somewhat reasonable out of pocket maxes. at the very least, a $100,000 appendix surgery will only cost you $7,000 max, and then you are covered for all other medical expenses for the rest of the year
- ataturk 8y agoWhen I was between jobs last year, I did not find any "$300-500" per month. No! I ended up doing COBRA and spending $1400/month, which is a mortgage! Had I found more reasonable health insurance I would not have jumped at the first offer I got and put myself in the situation I am in now. Shit, at $500/mo for health ins. I could have actually stayed inside my budget and really improved my career. Now I'm sitting here, it's a year later, and I'm a year older, and still wondering how the hell to pull of the next decade of employment (or whatever).
- mtlynch 8y agoI'm living off savings from Google and jobs prior to Google. Google had really high comp and I don't spend very much money outside of the fact that I live in Manhattan, so I have about 2-3 years of runway from that stockpile of savings. My health insurance is $470 for a basic high deductible plan.
- Thespian2 8y agoThis is a fundamental problem with Health Insurance being primarily tied to employment. Many older devs, with families to take care of, would experiment this way with health insurance better than what is currently available outside of employer-provided versions.
- carlmcqueen 8y agoKnew I recognized this guy from the greenPi post he made. I'm a sucker for posts about raspberry pi task automation. If anything he is extremely good at getting some buzz around things he is working on and deriving value from having worked at Google.
- rashomon 8y agoI followed him down the Sia rabbit hole and found he was the only person this side of the hemisphere to get a Sia node running off a Synology NAS (and who could explain it in Layman's terms). One of the smarter ones out there.
- mitko 8y agoKudos to Michael for keeping busy with projects. I quit my job 6 months ago. Gave myself 6 months to see if I would descend into complacent procrastination, and if so - I'd find another job. Having no job, but enough saving to rely on, has been a blessing. I've learned so many things from creative writing to deep learning, wrote a lot of personal essays, biked for 500miles, and did some side projects. Having one unsuccessful attempt at a startup convinced me that this is a much preferable route to getting back to salaried employment. The learning is a lot more, and there is a higher potential for payoff.
- mjhoy 8y agoWhere did you bike?
- mitko 8y agoFrom Medford, OR to San Francisco along the coast, but skipped a section before Crescent City due to advice of it being dangerous to cycle through. I put some photos at #or2ca17
- syndacks 8y agocool - I've done that route as well. care to expand on the 'advice of it being dangerous'?
- mitko 8y agoCave Junction to Crescent city is a narrow two lane road with high cliffs/drops on each side, and a tunnel, with semi-trucks taking that route (I was told). I opted for a shuttle for that section after looking it up on Google StreetView - http://oregon-point.com/southwest-point/ http://oregon-point.com/southwest-point/
- bitL 8y agoTry another start up before you go back ;-)
- quickthrower2 8y agoThis guy seems to have a lot of freedom to experiment. I am considering doing the same, but knuckle down on a single idea, born from identifying a real problem people are willing to pay for (enough to make a living).
- dopeboy 8y agoI did this five years ago. The point that most resonated with me is control over one's time which leads to true agency.
- mtlynch 8y agoAuthor here. Happy to answer any questions about this post.
- deft 8y agoThanks, I liked your post but couldn't help but feel a bit jealous. I've seen a few of your other blog posts before and really liked them. Have you still been working with Sia? What are your thoughts on Filecoin or other alternatives? You're one of the few people with any understanding of this, what are the barriers preventing adoption and even lower prices? Have you read or contributed to the source code? Was that too many questions?
- mtlynch 8y agoThanks for reading! >Have you still been working with Sia? Not really anymore. It's hard to walk away because I have so much fun experimenting with Sia, but I don't think I can really make a living doing anything with Sia. My Sia blog had a dedicated, enthusiastic following, but the niche is so small that the following was like 50 people. >What are your thoughts on Filecoin or other alternatives? I haven't looked too deeply into Filecoin. I read their whitepaper, but I feel like it's hard to really grasp before I have software I can actually run. They still haven't published any code, just some whitepapers. Filecoin has so much money and so many employees that it's plausible that they're working on something in secret that's going to blow everyone else away once it's released. But it's also possible that they've got nothing and they're going to release a $250M dud. I think Storj is a trainwreck with almost zero chance of coming out of the decentralized storage game on top. They're not even really a decentralized storage project. They're an open source project that tells people they're decentralized to cash in on the trend towards decentralization. >You're one of the few people with any understanding of this, what are the barriers preventing adoption and even lower prices? The biggest barrier right now is how difficult it is for customers to store data on Sia. I can sign up for AWS/GCP/Azure and have data in their clouds in ~15 minutes. With Sia, there are SO many steps just to start uploading data and the process is not documented well. Not only that, there are huge waits between steps. So it's like start Sia, wait 36 hours for the blockchain to sync, create a wallet, wait an hour for the wallet to initialize, unlock the wallet, wait 10 mins for wallet to unlock, and on and on. Even after Sia is totally initialized and ready for use, it's still much harder than anything else to use. They don't yet support backup and recovery, so you're stuck uploading an additional copy of all your data to another cloud provider anyway. And then even in the remaining scenarios, there are no client libraries for using Sia, so you have to write a ton of boilerplate code to wrap HTTP calls to their API. >Have you read or contributed to the source code? I've read a lot of Sia's source code. I'm the #9 top contributor to their core codebase. Relative to other cryptocurrency projects, their code is good, but that's kind of a low bar. I think their code has been degrading over time. Their functions are getting much longer, more complicated, and depend on increasingly complex lock synchronization behavior. Their builds are broken about 50% of the time just due to flaky tests. >Was that too many questions? I'm ready for more!
- blunte 8y agoOnce you finally break free of the office/corporate mentality, suddenly the world opens up. The possibilities are so vast (but not all possibilities mean income). Breaking free from the golden handcuffs (or in my case, aluminum handcuffs), you start to realize that high income and lots of stuff really doesn't matter as much as experiences. And then you might even consider doing work that doesn't leverage your brain and career experience. That's actually freeing, because it means you're allowed to go do a manual labor job for a week if you want to. You stop comparing effective hourly rates (which usually suck you back into a corporate or consulting world). I envy the people who are born into entrepreneurial families. They may or may not go to college, but they usually do not start with the idea of "I go learn X in school so I can get a high paying job doing X". Instead, they seem more likely to seize opportunities with an expectation of success rather than a pessimistic view of cost/benefit. They will surely have more thin times, but they also have much greater chance of both hitting it big (selling a company) as well as actually filling their years with interesting experiences.
- matte_black 8y agoOnce you finally break free of the startup/entrepreneurial mentality, suddenly the world opens up. The possibilities are so vast (but not all possibilities mean freedom). Breaking free from the gold rush (or in my case, app rush), you start to realize that huge exits and lots of users really doesn't matter as much as comfort and stability. And then you might even consider doing work that doesn't give you equity or has potential for huge payoffs. That's actually freeing, because it means you're allowed to do your job, then go home and relax. You stop thinking about how much work you could get done if you weren’t relaxing (which usually sucks you back to a computer to chip away at a never ending todo list). I envy the people who are simply happy in serving others. They may or may not become super wealthy or travel as much, but they usually do not start with the idea of “the only work worth doing is for a company I own”. Instead, they seem more likely to take jobs with an expectation of being useful rather than an egotistical view of time/benefit. They will surely have more boring times, but they also have much greater chance of both being happy (living a normal life) as well as actually filling their years with meaningful accomplishments.
- 8y ago
- hajderr 8y agoI'm so happy for you and glad you've made the choice to go indie. I usually find it difficult to prioritize amongst all the inspiring things!
- mtlynch 8y agoThank you! And thanks for reading!
- greggman 8y agoI glad it worked out for the author but so far it hasn't worked out for me. It's been 5 years which wasn't my plan. I thought it would be 6 months until I figured out what I want to do. Things that happened. Travelled: found it mostly extremely lonely to travel alone. Got sick of seeing the same things (this place's contemporary art museum, that place's famous church). Of course I saw some amazing things but I now think I agree with some happiness researcher who claims travel is best in short < 1 week bursts every few months. Worked on personal projects. I do get some feeling of accomplishment but mostly I just feel lonely and isolated. At good jobs I had the camaraderie of close co-workers who became close friends and we really collaborated. I tried hanging out at cafes and coffee shops and that's better than staying home but not all that less isolating. The random people that show up are not people I talk to or become close to. I don't feel "free" at all. I'm sure it's partly in my mind. I might also be age differences. I'm older and need to think about retirement I realize I can't just make any random decision because there isn't time to correct. I tell myself I don't feel free because I don't have enough money to never work again. I do have to do something that earns significant income (enough to retire in 10-12 years). If I did have enough to retire maybe I'd still not feel free like not having enough to do X where X is whatever (fund that project, whatever...) though maybe I'd feel free to do things and never worry about income (volunteer for various things?). Now I don't volunteer because that's not going to help me earn money to retire. I'm not sure I'd volunteer or not. I'm pretty much completely lost at this point. No idea what I want to do anymore. I waste my days reading HN and browsing the net and working on personal projects that have no future prospects and answering questions on SO. I go to a meet up or 2 a week and that's about it.
- coastal-fiesta 8y ago>I agree with some happiness researcher who claims travel is best in short < 1 week bursts every few months. Got a link to that?
- marcandre 8y agoDan Ariely's research for example shows that duration has little effect on our memory of an event. Check his TED talks.
- ironjunkie 8y agoI liked reading this blog post and found it interesting as this is something I'm looking to do eventually. Also, is it only me that have such a boring life? or normal people don't have that issue to have too many emails/notifications to respond to? How many people contact you, seriously? But I have a mini-rant about all those blog-posts with subjects such as "Why I decided to quit Google", or "Why I'm leaving for a startup after being a boss at Facebook for X years". Those blog post usually always reiterate that the "Smartest people in the world" work at those companies and that it is the "Best job in the world". Sometimes a little bit less arrogance and namedropping would be a good thing.
- nunez 8y agoNot a single mention of money, which means that this author has it (or plenty of it). But big-ups to using a Surface!
- mtlynch 8y agoNice catch on the Surface! I was trying to figure out how you knew I use one, then I remembered the cartoon. It's actually a coincidence because I asked my cartoonist to draw a non-Apple laptop, though I didn't specifically say Surface. But she drew a Surface, and that is indeed what I use.
- megamindbrian2 8y agoI did see your other post and I appreciate this. I quit too and wrote about some stuff. Thank you for this.
- adamnemecek 8y agoI quit my job like two years ago to work in a project. There were bumps but overall really loving it and would recommend it to anyone.